Moved my blog to blog.wagemakers.be

If you follow my blog posts with an RSS reader, update the rss feed to: https://blog.wagemakers.be/atom.xml
…If you want to continue to follow me off-course ;-)

I moved my blog from GitHub to my own hosting ( powered by Procolix ).
Procolix sponsored my hosting for 20 years, till I decided to start my company Mask27.dev.

One reason is that Microsoft seems to like to put “copilot everywhere”, including on repositories hosted on github. While I don’t dislike AI ( artificial intelligence ), LLM ( Large Language Models ) are a nice piece of technology. The security, privacy, and other issues are overlooked or even just ignored.

The migration was a bit more complicated as usual, as nothing “is easy” ;-)

You’ll find the pitfalls of moving my blog below as they might be useful for somebody else ( including the future me ).

Html redirect

I use Jekyll to generate my webpages on my blog. I might switch to HUGO in the future.

While there’re Jekyll plugins available to preform a redirect, I decide to keep it simple and added a http header to _includes/head.html

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://blog.wagemakers.be/blog/2026/01/26/blog-wagemakers-be/" />

Hardcoded links

I had some hardcoded links for image, url, etc on my blog posts.

I used the script below to update the links in my _post directory.

#!/bin/sh

set -o errexit
set -o pipefail
set -o nounset

for file in *; do

  echo "... Processing file: ${file}"

  sed -i ${file} -e s@https://stafwag.github.io/blog/blog/@https://blog.wagemakers.be/blog/@g
  sed -i ${file} -e s@https://stafwag.github.io/blog/images/@https://blog.wagemakers.be/images/@g
  sed -i ${file} -e s@\(https://stafwag.github.io/blog\)@\(https://blog.wagemakers.be\)@

done

Disqus

I use DISQUS as the comment system on my blog. As the HTML pages got a proper redirect, I could ask Disqus to reindex the pages so the old comments became available again.

More information is available at: https://help.disqus.com/en/articles/1717126-redirect-crawler

Without a redirect, you can download the URL in a csv and add a migration URL to the csv file and upload it to Disqus. You can find information about it in the link below.

https://help.disqus.com/en/articles/1717129-url-mapper

RSS redirect

I didn’t find a good way to redirect for RSS feeds, which RSS readers use correctly.
If you know a good way to handle it, please let me know.

I tried to add an XML redirect as suggested at: https://www.rssboard.org/redirect-rss-feed. But this doesn’t seem to work with the RSS readers I tested (NewsFlash, Akregator).

These are the steps I took.

HTML header

I added the following headers to _includes/head.html

<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml"  href="{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Wagemakers Atom Feed" href="https://wagemakers.be/atom.xml">


<<link rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"  href="{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Wagemakers Atom Feed" href="https://wagemakers.be/atom.xml">

Custom feed.xml

When I switched from Octopress to “plain jekyll” I started to use the jekyll-feedplugin. But I still had the old RSS page from Octopress available, so I decided to use it to generate atom.xml and feed.xml in the link rel=self and link rel="alternate" directives.

Full code below or on GitHub: https://github.com/stafwag/blog/blob/gh-pages/feed.xml

---
layout: null
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">



  <title><![CDATA[stafwag Blog]]></title>
  <link href="https://blog.wagemakers.be//atom.xml" rel="self"/>
  <link rel="alternate" href="https://blog.wagemakers.be/atom.xml" /> <link href="https://blog.wagemakers.be }}"/>
  <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://blog.wagemakers.be//atom.xml" />
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://blog.wagemakers.be/atom.xml" />
  <link rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://blog.wagemakers.be//atom.xml" />
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://blog.wagemakers.be/atom.xml" />
  <updated>2026-01-26T20:10:56+01:00</updated>
  <id>https://blog.wagemakers.be</id>
  <author>
    <name><![CDATA[Staf Wagemakers]]></name>
    
  </author>
  <generator uri="http://octopress.org/">Octopress</generator>

{% for post in site.posts limit: 10000 %}
  <entry>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[{% if site.titlecase %}{{ post.title | titlecase | cdata_escape }}{% else %}{{ post.title | cdata_escape }}{% endif %}]]></title>
 <link href="{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}{{ post.url }}"/>
    <updated></updated>
    <id>https://blog.wagemakers.be/</id>
    <content type="html"><![CDATA[]]></content>
  </entry>
{% endfor %}
</feed>

Notify users

I created this blog post to notify the users ;-)

Have fun!

Links

• https://help.disqus.com/en/articles/1717129-url-mapper
• https://help.disqus.com/en/articles/1717126-redirect-crawler
• https://www.heerentanna.com/blog/move-disqus-comment-old-url-new.html
• https://www.rssboard.org/redirect-rss-feed